Collections of Resources on Education for Sustainability and Green Living

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Sustainable New Urban Mobility

“Sustainable New Urban Mobility”

This month we interviewed Philipp Rode, Executive
Director of LSE Cities and Senior Research Fellow at the London School
of Economics and Political Science. We have asked him to talk about
their recent report "Towards New Urban Mobility" and what their findings
mean for the future of mobility in the EU. You can read the full
interview by following the link below. We also recommend reading the
report itself.

EUKN:
You described three types of trends towards new urban mobility, i.e.
international base or national base? Which of the trends are more
decisive and why?

Rode: Describing an international trend approach, which
gives us a broader view of transport. I sometimes describe it as an
Schizophrenic situation: we are seeing at the moment, clearly on a
global level, we are very much in a period of rapid motorization.
Particularly in a development world context, emerging economies, more
cars are being sold i.e. emerging wealth levels, which has shifted
towards a type of motorised mobility. Which in many OECD countries and
cities have already experienced its peak over the last ten/fifteen
years. At that point there is no longer an increase in an motorisation
perspective. ...

Changes
in urban mobility no longer follow traditional patterns of motorisation
and policy makers need to embrace an increasing number of alternatives,
including cycling and walking as main modes of travel, bike and car
sharing, multimodal travel options and electric vehicles. Smartphone
applications now support people’s travel decisions as they move through
the city, opening up possibilities for smarter mobility services that
respond flexibly to user needs.

New
business models inspired by the sharing economy and disruptive
technologies are ushering in an exciting new age in transportation: the
era of smart mobility. The arrival of on-demand ride services like Uber
and Lyft, real-time ridesharing services such as Carma, carsharing
programs such as Zipcar and car2go, bike sharing programs, and thousands
of miles of new urban bike lanes are all changing how people get
around.